Giselle Sperber (@_giselles) described an office routine which included 1 hour each day of open office, held at a nearby cafe, in order to gather ideas from their website users.

Giselle is a user experience designer who defines her user experience work as a community engagement tool. You can answer questions and get to understand the hurdles that your users are faced with. You need a PC, a gathering place, and someone to work with. For example, in a library, get a librarian to help you. You can use a range of devices and software to record sessions, or just a notebook will do as well. All this will help you “think like a passenger” (See: http://www.vic.gov.au/blog/2015/02/27/thinking-like-victorian/). Do it once a month! Use it to improve forms!

Code for America relies on government, community developers and third party suppliers to implement code or data based projects for community benefit. To get a project off the ground, you need 1) open data, 2) working together, 3) reliance on standards (so that it works).

Open Data

You need to be able to access your data source, and this might require the data owner to make it available – or open for access.

Working Together

You need to achieve collaboration between different sectors such as different sources of data. Different resources and expertise will be required to deliver the project, and they all need to be involved. Working together means that you can ensure the involvement that you need, and share your success too. You need developers and designers involved.

Standards Reliant

Making sure that your project will work for end users and for the platform you need. For example, getting data into the format for bus timetables would mean that you have to use the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). Data cleaning will be required.

Lauren Anderson presented at Oracle CloudWorld on the collaborative consumption movement. The conference was held in Melbourne on the 4th March 2014. Lauren provides a glimpse into the collaborative revolution. Read the rest of this entry »

How do organisations prepare themselves for the next technological revolution? The Deloitte Tech Trends 2014 report gives us some pointers about aspects of our IT work that we need to focus on this year.